Sharing of documents and collaborative editing can create an unmanageable proliferation of similar documents. While advanced solutions exist for document versioning and collaborative editing, these solutions do not address cases in which a user copies content from an existing document and intentionally saves it into a new, separate document. For example, a technical user may use the outline of a technical design from another product, and add content relevant to the new product. This scenario does not create a new version of the document because the purpose is different. In another example, a presentation document may borrow slides from a set of available presentations with modifications. As another example, a text document may aggregate descriptions of products from multiple in-depth descriptions.
A problem arises, for example, in those scenarios when the source material changes. For instance, if the source text and slides are updated by the original owner, those updates may be valuable to capture in the derivative works. But since the derivative works are in new documents and new document types where traditional revision control would not apply, existing solutions cannot provide notification of update. It may also be the case that the owner of the new document may have forgotten where the source material came from. Even if the new document owner tracked the source material, the source material may have evolved into other versions, whether tracked by version control or outside the scope of version control.